Days After Maine Shooting, NRA Gleefully Shares Ad With New House Speaker

The National Rifle Association posted an old video of Mike Johnson opposing gun safety measures, essentially bragging about how it has the new House speaker in its pocket.

The NRA’s Sunday night tweet was also just a few days after a gunman killed 18 people in Maine, the biggest mass shooting in the state’s history and the country’s deadliest mass shooting of the year thus far.

In the 2019 video, Johnson—who is an NRA member—says that gun ownership is one of Americans’ “fundamental freedoms” and accuses Democrats of infringing on basic rights by trying to pass gun safety regulations.

“As NRA members, we understand the Second Amendment is grounded in fundamental freedoms,” Johnson says. “We make the point on the Hill all the time when these gun bills come up and when Democrats are trying to push their agenda on the people. We remind them that the Second Amendment is grounded in those fundamental freedoms―those inalienable rights that we have to personal liberty and personal security and private property.”

The NRA’s boastful tweet came at the tail end of a weekend that saw 12 different mass shootings, according to the Gun Violence Archive. The nonprofit defines a mass shooting as an attack when at least four people are injured or killed, excluding the shooter.

Between Friday and Sunday, shooters opened fire in Indianapolis, Chicago, Atlanta, and Tampa, as well as cities in Texas, Kansas, Maryland, New Mexico, Ohio, and Johnson’s home state of Louisiana.

Last week, the state of Maine waited in terror during a two-day hunt for a man who killed 18 people and wounded 13 more in the town of Lewiston. Authorities found the shooter’s body in a trailer on Friday. He appeared to have shot himself.

There have been 580 mass shootings in 2023 so far, which averages to about two mass shootings per day. These attacks have resulted in 616 people killed, 2,426 people injured, and countless people traumatized.

But according to Johnson, “at the end of the day, the problem is the human heart.”

“It’s not the guns, it’s not the weapons,” he insisted on Fox News a day after the Maine shooting.

Donald Trump’s social media addiction may soon cost him big time.

Judge Tanya Chutkan on Sunday reinstated an October 16 gag order on the former president in his federal election subervsion trial, denying a request to freeze the order while his defense scrambles to appeal it, noting that the order will remain in effect while a federal court undergoes its review, reported The New York Times.

“The First Amendment rights of participants in criminal proceedings must yield, when necessary, to the orderly administration of justice,” Chutkan wrote in a statement issued alongside the original order, which still permitted Trump to critique the current government and its administration, to claim his prosecution is politically motivated, to claim his innocence, or to make statements criticizing current political rivals in the presidential election.

But just hours after the order was brought back, Trump ran his mouth on social media—attacking both Judge Chutkan and a potential key witness in the case.

“I have just learned that the very Biased, Trump Hating Judge in D.C., who should have RECUSED herself due to her blatant and open loathing of your favorite President, ME, has reimposed a GAG ORDER which will put me at a disadvantage against my prosecutorial and political opponents,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Mere hours before, Trump also attacked one of the potential witnesses in his D.C. trial, which hinges on four felony charges related to his effort to subvert the 2020 election: former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr.

“I called Bill Barr Dumb, Weak, Slow Moving, Lethargic, Gutless, and Lazy, a RINO WHO COULDN’T DO THE JOB. He just didn’t want to be Impeached, which the Radical Left Lunatics were preparing to do. I was tough on him in the White House, for good reason, so now this Moron says about me, to get even, “his verbal skills are limited.” Well, that’s one I haven’t heard before. Tell that to the biggest political crowds in the history of politics, by far. Bill Barr is a LOSER,” Trump posted.

Either Trump won’t learn his lesson or he just doesn’t care about the consequences. The former president was also slapped with a gag order in his New York bank fraud trial with Judge Arthur Engoron, which Trump has violated twice so far, first earning a $5,000 fine and then a subsequent $10,000 fine along with the threat of jail time.

Israel’s military began a heavy aerial bombardment of Gaza after nightfall on Friday and announced that it is “expanding” its ground operations into the territory—but did not declare a full-scale ground invasion that has been expected for weeks.

Internet and phone service in Gaza has been mostly, if not entirely, cut off amid the bombing. The International Committee of the Red Cross cannot reach its medical personnel. A Washington Post reporter said the paper cannot reach its colleagues, either.

Some people, communicating via satellite phones, have described the attack as the “heaviest bombardment yet,” according to independent journalist Sharif Kouddous.

“People can’t call ambulances or civil defense. We are being bombed in an unprecedented manner,” said an unidentified journalist at a Gaza hospital, according to a translation by The Nation’s Palestinian correspondent, Mohammed El-Kurd. “The sky around us just lights up [with explosions], and no one knows what’s going on.”

The Post reported earlier Friday that the Biden administration has urged Israel to rethink its plans, backing a “surgical” operation reliant on drone strikes and special operations forces instead of an all-out ground invasion, which they fear could lead to mass Palestinian civilian casualties and the loss of Israeli soldiers. Such an invasion would also threaten to upend negotiations with Hamas to free around 200 hostages.

It remains to be seen if what’s occurring tonight is a limited ground operation, as the U.S. has pushed for, or something worse.

Since Hamas’s October 7 attack, Israel has cut off access to water, food, and power in Palestinian territories. Israeli attacks have killed at least 7,028 people in Gaza and injured more than 18,000, according to figures from the Gaza Health Ministry. On the Israeli side of the conflict, more than 1,400 people have been killed and another 5,400 injured.

A poll published Friday found that only 49 percent of Israelis want to hold off on the ground offensive against Hamas, down from 65 percent last week.

Representative Dean Phillips announced Thursday that he’s opening a bid as President Joe Biden’s Democratic primary challenger. But as the election landscape shapes up to be another razor-thin rematch between Biden and former President Donald Trump, the effort begs the question: What the hell is Phillips thinking?

Phillips, a multimillionaire former chairman and co-owner of Talenti Gelato, and heir to one of America’s largest liquor dynasties, was elected to Minnesota’s 3rd congressional district in 2018—the first Democrat to win the seat in nearly 60 years.

And for the last 15 months, Phillips has been campaigning for “prominent young Democrats” to challenge the 80-year-old president, reported The Atlantic, believing it’s time for Biden, who he has described as a “president of great competence and success,” to “pass the torch.” Failing to find that candidate, the 54-year-old Phillips has apparently decided to throw himself into the race.

“Democrats are telling me that they want not a coronation but they want a competition,” Phillips said during an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation.

He might be onto something. Although the self-described eternal optimist’s chances of unseating the incumbent president are slim, they’re not zero. A recent poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that 77 percent of Americans believe Biden is too old to be effective for another presidential term.

That same poll found that Democrats thought both Biden and Trump, age 77, were too old for the gig, while just 28 percent of Republicans felt that Trump’s age would make him ineffective for another term.

Yet if Phillips somehow, against all odds, beats Biden in the Democratic primary—will he be popular enough to keep Trump from office? It’s probably safe to assume that this is the first time many Americans are even hearing about Phillips.

The Democratic establishment is also still firmly behind Biden.

“Biden’s already beaten Trump once,” Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, Jim Messina, told The Atlantic. “He’s the one guy who can beat him again.”

Newly elected House Speaker Mike Johnson is trying to distance himself from his deeply homophobic track record by claiming he can’t remember much of it.

During an interview on Fox News, Johnson was asked about comments he made while he was an attorney for the far-right Christian advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom. During his tenure as senior attorney and spokesperson for ADF, he called homosexuality “sinful” and “destructive,” advocated against same-sex marriage, and pushed for the criminalization of gay sex.

Hearing his own comments repeated back to him by Fox’s Sean Hannity, Johnson said simply, “I don’t even remember some of them.”

Quickly moving on from the “I forgot” defense, Johnson argued that making homophobic statements was just a part of his job in defending the state marriage amendments, which defined marriage as between a man and a woman.

“I was a religious liberty defense lawyer, and I was called to go in and defend those cases in the court,” he said.

“I am a rule-of-law guy,” Johnson said. “When the Supreme Court issued the Obergefell opinion that became the law of the land, I respect the rule of law,” referring to the case that made same-sex marriage legal.

Despite his attempt to revise history, Johnson’s record speaks for itself. In September 2004, for example, the future House speaker wrote an op-ed for a local paper in Shreveport, Louisiana, in which he called homosexual relationships “unnatural,” “harmful,” and “dangerous.”

Johnson isn’t trying to be confusing. He admitted to Hannity that if people want to know what this “rule-of-law guy” believes, “go pick a Bible off your shelf and read it.”

Ivanka Trump may have a new job in her father’s real estate empire: help dissolve it.

On Friday, a federal court judge ruled that the Trump heiress cannot block the subpoena calling her to testify against her father and brothers, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., in their $250 million New York fraud case.

“A trial is a search for the truth,” Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron said before ruling against her.

Ivanka Trump has until November 1 to appeal the decision, after which she will be required to take the witness stand.

The businesswoman was originally expected to be named as a defendant in the fraud trial, though a New York appeals court struck down her inclusion, ruling that the claims against her were too old.

Judge Arthur Engoron issued a summary judgment in September that found New York Attorney General Letitia James had already proved Trump misvalued his properties and committed business fraud, soon after dissolving the business certificates of Trump’s companies. What remains to be seen in the trial is whether Trump violated other laws and, ultimately, what kind of financial penalty he might have to pay.

While other GOP leadership stuck to their usual “thoughts and prayers” mantra for the victims of the Lewiston, Maine, shooting, the newly minted speaker of the House tried out a new gun control dismissal tactic.

In a one-on-one interview with Sean Hannity on Thursday, Speaker Mike Johnson made an old Republican line new again, claiming that it’s not guns that kill people—it’s their hearts.

“At the end of the day, the problem is the human heart. It’s not guns, it’s not the weapons,” Johnson said. “At the end of the day, we have to protect the right of the citizens to protect themselves, and that’s the Second Amendment. That’s why our party stands so strongly for that.”

“This is not the time to be talking about legislation. We’re in the middle of that crisis right now,” Johnson added.

It’s no surprise the Republicans’ House speaker is dismissing gun control and gun violence so quickly after a mass shooting.

And for what it’s worth, his push to allow citizens to protect themselves in mass casualty events isn’t backed by the data. Between 2000 and 2021, fewer than 3 percent of 433 active attacks in the U.S. ended with a civilian firing back, according to data collected by the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University, which described active attacks as shootings of one or more people in which law enforcement are called to the scene while violence is still ongoing.

Wednesday’s assault in Lewiston left 18 people dead, the largest death toll so far out of 565 mass shootings this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive. Law enforcement agencies are still scouring the woods of southern Maine in a desperate search for the suspect, believed to be Robert Card, a certified firearms instructor who received extensive combat training from the Army Reserve Unit, reported CNN.

Dead or alive, the Koch brothers continue to have an iron grip on American politics.

The Koch network, an arm of right-wing organizations cultivated by David and Charles Koch, have been working overtime to gut federal agencies that impact Koch Industries’ bottom line, driving a coordinated campaign to bring lawsuits targeted at deregulation to the conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court, according to an investigation by The Guardian.

In a 37-minute panel discussion obtained by Documented, senior employees at Koch-affiliated entities described the court’s new makeup as a “landscape opportunity” that they’re “doubling down on.”

“That’s why we are partnering with organizations that can get the right cases to the Supreme Court,” said Casey Mattox, a legal strategist at the Koch advocacy group Americans for Prosperity.

Some of the issues at stake are pollution, consumer protections from predatory lenders, and workers’ rights. Koch Industries, which makes most of its money in the energy, trade, and chemicals industries, is the second-largest privately owned firm in the United States, with annual revenues exceeding $125 billion.

The initiative appears to have already done the trick, with two cases attempting to curtail the government’s ability to regulate corporations already before the court in its 2023–24 term, thanks to the backing of Koch-linked groups, reported the outlet.

Read more at The Guardian.

Georgia’s legislature will literally have to return to the drawing board after a federal court ruled that the state’s discriminatory congressional maps broke the law.

The new maps, which must be redrawn before the 2024 election, will be required to include one Black-majority federal congressional district, as well as two new Black-majority districts in Georgia’s state Senate and five new Black-majority districts in its House.

Thursday’s ruling consolidates three cases brought against Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, which argued that Georgia’s political leaders were not adequately representing the Black communities that fueled the state’s population growth over the last decade.

In a 516-page order, U.S. District Court Judge Steve Jones ruled against Raffensperger, deciding that the GOP-drawn maps violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Jones noted that although Georgia has made “great strides” in increasing the political opportunities of Black voters since the law was enacted, “the Court determines that in certain areas of the State, the political process is not equally open to Black voters.”

“For example, in the past decade, all of Georgia’s population growth was attributable to the minority population, however, the number of majority-Black congressional and legislative districts remained the same,” Jones wrote.

The state is expected to appeal the decision, though that effort may fall flat for Republicans. Similar attempts to save GOP-gerrymandered maps have failed in Florida and Alabama.

Other legal challenges to congressional maps are underway across the country, including in Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, New Mexico, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah, reported the Associated Press.

Many of America’s autoworkers are about to see a massive bump in pay.

Ford Motor Company and the United Auto Workers reached a tentative agreement on Wednesday, smashing records with a historic contract that other autoworkers hope will start a radical shift in the industry. The labor victory is a huge win for the UAW—and shows what workers everywhere can achieve with the power of unions.

After a six-week strike, the two organizations have agreed to a staggering 25 percent base wage increase through April 2028, raising union members’ top wages to more than $40 an hour.

Starting salaries will also see a massive bump, growing by 68 percent over the term of the contract to more than $28 an hour. Meanwhile, the lowest-paid workers at Ford will receive an immediate 85 percent pay increase, with a raise of more than 150 percent over the lifetime of the agreement.

The union also finally recouped benefits that workers lost during the Great Recession, including a cost of living allowance that effectively bumps that 25 percent hike to a 33 percent raise, as well as a three-year wage progression (meaning workers can get pay bumps much more quickly). Retirement benefits were also improved, and in a first, the contract also permits union workers the right to strike over future plant closures.

Altogether, the deal will increase union members’ wages more in the next four years than they have in the previous two decades, according to data from the union.

“We won things nobody thought possible,” said UAW President Shawn Fain. “Since the strike began, Ford put 50 percent more on the table than when we walked out. This agreement sets us on a new path to make things right at Ford, at the Big Three, and across the auto industry.”

The eyebrow-raising agreement adds pressure on General Motors and Stellantis, where UAW workers are continuing to strike. So far, Stellantis has temporarily laid off more than 2,000 workers since some 7,000 union members began their strike at the Sterling Heights Assembly Plant on Monday.

“It’s usually a domino effect, you know, for the most part. We want to stay optimistic that if they can do it, then we could reach something tentative,” striking employee Sheu Shea Anderson told ABC Channel 7 Detroit.

Both companies have released statements saying that they are working to secure agreements “as soon as possible.”